As shown in F. J. Rouan et al. U.S. Pat. No. 2,736,999, apparatus has been provided for feeding individual pieces of mailing material, from each of a plurality of hoppers, to an intermittently movable conveyor on which one of the pieces of material is nested within another, pre-folded piece of material preparatory to stuffing the assembled pieces into an envelope. As shown in Luperti U.S. Pat. No. 4,898,570, a method and apparatus have been provided for half folding sequentially and nesting a plurality of identically sized paper sheets. Thus it is generally known in the art to nest one sheet within another, folded, sheet.
Heretofore, folders, such as the aforementioned folders, have been limited to folding and nesting a collation of sheets having the same size.
There is now an interest in forming collations of documents of more than one size and folder such collations with the smaller documents nested in the fold of the larger documents. For example, it is desired that a full size insurance statement (or collation of statements) be folded around a smaller size check that is to be mailed with the statement. The typical collating machines and folders do not easily provide for such special processing because of the problem of controlling the smaller document in the collating machine and the folder.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improvement to folders that will allow the folder to perform such nested folding of collations of different size documents.